


We Come Back to Ourselves

by Runeless



Series: I Know My True Name [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath, Death of a loved one, Delicious Gay Marriage, Gen, Less Delicious Gay Death, M/M, Nameverse, Not sexually, Rare Character, Teacher-Student Relationship, Weaponsmithing, widower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 21:44:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3426644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runeless/pseuds/Runeless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scarecrow takes care of unfinished business in the weeks after the Asylum escape, and the group plans their next move- one related to suits and lounges and ice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Come Back to Ourselves

**We Come Back to Ourselves**

 

                Your given name is Jonathan Crane, but your _name_ is Scarecrow.

                Joker gave it to you.  Good man.  Strange.  He sees far, and you respect him for it, as he respects you for your resolve.  The two of you will do great things, you believe, so long as you both shall live.  In this city, life is not certain at all.

                It makes what you are doing rather dangerous, though you are fairly certain you will be safe.  You are walking the streets at night, a shadow among the shadows, tall and thin.  You are like this place, dark and grim; it makes you anonymous, unnoticeable.  You are fairly certain that, despite the danger of Gotham in general and the specific danger to you, an escaped madman and criminal loose for two weeks now who is on every most wanted list, you will not be seen.

                Your protective tail is not so invisible.  For your safety, and because they are your friends and they worry, you are being followed by Joker and Harley Quinn, currently clown-dressed lovers, formerly inmate and psychologist of Arkham Asylum, before that a mystery and an unhappy college graduate.  You don’t know what Joker was before he was Joker, and are grateful not to know; he should stay a mystery.  Some things are improved by the lack of knowledge.

                ( He talks, a little.  Of a wife, sometimes, and a pool of chemicals.  Of a man in a red hood, or of himself in a red hood, and taking responsibility.  You are grateful he leaves it cryptic enough to be fuel for the imagination, and that his past is multiple choice; your favorite answer is D: None of the above.  Joker _is_.  You are not a man given to many flights of fancy, but you welcome the impression of vast unknowable mystery the jester represents.)

                They sneak after you like the world’s two most colorful assassins.  They are brilliant splashes of horrible color and it renders them totally invisible, in their own way even less noticeable then you are; people are scared of them, shut the door when they see them approach.  You are but another grotesque figure of the night in a town stuffed with them, and nobody is particularly surprised at your appearance; but Joker and Harley speak of light, of laughter and life, and in a city of the dead there is no force more terrifying.  Doors bar shut and the good people of Gotham avert their eyes.  The more numerous bad people of Gotham take a glance at the two and move on; something in that crocodile portion of the brain warns them to leave these two alone, that same part that warns of the poison in brilliantly colored dart frogs and monarch butterflies.

                You had not asked them to come, but they had, and you are grateful for it.  The city is dangerous but you do not have time to consider that danger; you are busy, you are on a mission.  They will handle that part for you.  They will worry about safety, about cops and Batman and danger.  You will worry only for your dead.

With your guardian clown angels in tow, you proceed towards your goal- a street, a house with a garage slowly consuming it, and the widower inside.

                A long time ago, you had worked in the laboratory with a brilliant upcoming student named Otto Straw.  Beyond a multitude of jokes revolving around him being the last Straw (in college, unmarried, gay- there were a wide variety of amusing categories to declare himself the last Straw in), he had a genius mind and a gift for understanding people, necessities in the field of advanced psychology.  While he shared only some of your passion for understanding fear, he utterly shared your reason why- being a gay man in America, he had experienced more than his fair share of torment.  He had been a massive slab of a man, had built himself into a veritable meat juggernaut, and you respected that- understood it, the need to become great to keep others from making you small.

                You were there when he met Raymond, who had suffered but never grown from it, and Otto by his very nature sheltered him.  Otto knew what you did, that most people, faced with adversity, crumbled, and so he didn’t blame Raymond.  And he learned that Raymond was brilliant, too, with machines and metal, an engineer, and brilliance shared became love, shared.  You were happy for Otto, and for Raymond, too, who you had never known personally- but he made Otto happy and that made him friend enough.  You had always been close to your students.

                Then Gotham ate them alive, the way it always did.  Joker, whatever he once was, is now something that does not understand this place; half growth half smile, he does not see the way this place breaks the soul down.  He is immune, by virtue of glorious madness; he broke _up_ , rather than down, and it spares him.  You endure, and so it does not break you, but you see how it grinds- how it hungers.  Supernatural, almost- and you have seen enough and more to know that the supernatural is real.  They say a man flies in Metropolis these days, that a red blur dominates a city out West with powerful fists and more powerful legs.  There is talk of an island of warrior women, out in the Atlantic, killing ship captains with swords and lightning.  Madness, of course- madness like men dipped in chemicals and coming out clown-faced, madness like a prison break led by a man wearing a dragon for skin, madness like a woman who can move the earth with green growth.  You believe in it all whole-heartedly.

                ( Madness like a grown man taking the name _Scarecrow_ , and fighting at the side of the jailbreak of the crazed.  You will admit this only once, but you will come clean at least once- this is madness, what you do, and you are so intensely _grateful_ for it, this chance to be mad, and young again, and free.  There is a mask you see in your head, a mask you shall make of burlap.  You will wear a mortician’s suit, bear a fine cane, and you shall be stuffed with straw.  This first, this visit to your dearly departed, and after that… then it will be time to wear your name on your sleeve.  _Scarecrow._ )

                 The danger happened to Otto.  Three rich young punks had decided to hurt Raymond, and Otto- who was big, who was strong, who loved Raymond and had proposed to him on bent knee not a week prior- hurt _them_ instead.  He did not kill them, merely broken limbs, but it was not enough to be let alone- for they were _rich_ and that has always counted for everything.  The three could not manage Otto’s imprisonment but they got him expelled, and thus went away your one and only heir.

                Raymond, in courage and sacrifice, dropped out too, as not a week after Otto’s expulsion a gang descended on the big man and broke him.  Raymond went to his side, and though you had barely met the thin slip of a man, you respected his dedication to his lover.  In sickness and in health.  Words must mean more than air to be words and not mere noises.  The power of words lie in the symbolism therein.

                _That_ is a truth you know that Joker does not.  You understand the power of symbols.  He simply is a symbol- he doesn’t see how powerful he is for it.  But you… you understand why ritual exists.  There is a reason things should be done a certain way, sometimes, a meaning for it beyond tradition itself.

                They had lived, best they could, and you had helped, best you could, hiring Otto as an assistant on the sly, being present at their wedding (and paying for it, your dowry for a beloved apprentice’s wedding), and they had grown as well as any plant can in sun-starved Gotham.  Raymond’s skill with mechanics turned their home garage into a mechanic’s garage, and Otto’s work with you had given him a living wage.  And so, for a time, they had been happy.

                But you hated bullies and went after Strange when the bald monster had begun to covet the university, and when you were banished to Arkham Otto had taken up your flag.  This you had learned after the fact, sneaking out of your sewer base- and base it is, you, Joker, Harley, Croc, and the enigma who yet bears no proper name from Joker- to find out what had happened in the time between straitjackets and sewer freedom.  Wanted posters plaster every wall, but you had all agreed that you, pale and thin as a mortician’s Platonic ideal, don’t warrant notice the same way the others would- though given how people are reacting to Joker and Harley, perhaps all your cautions had been unwarranted.  It’s something to mull over for future reference.

                At any rate, Otto had taken up your flag… and died for it.  Police had killed him, sure as anything, shot dead as he “was attempting escape from custody.”  He’d been arrested in the middle of a town hall, in the middle of a speech, to be brought in for “questioning.”  Then, when he had struggled, they had shot him there, in broad daylight before the crowd.  The powerful of Gotham do not need to trifle with silly hiding.  They kill openly.  The only murmur had been a blurb on the late news about “an angry gay male had attacked police and was killed in the incident.”  Male, instead of a man- there are simple ways to use words to hurt.

                You know the power of symbols.

                So you come to Raymond, because this is your fault.  Responsibility must be taken.  You knew that before Joker said it, a truth you shared- you’ve known it since you were a child pushed around and beaten, born of foster parents and government housing, and you realized the only person who could fight was yourself.  Terror was your weapon then, catching bullies by surprise- and no matter how big, an ambush could bring them down- and hurting them badly enough that they never hurt you again.  A hand without fingers cannot strangle.

                Otto did this for you.  This is your responsibility.  You come to apologize, to offer condolence- and to ask for the right to seek vengeance.  Raymond has done enough for his love, sacrificed future and security, and Otto would not wish for him to waste himself in vengeance.  As Otto took up your burden, you will ask to take up his.

                You come upon the house, in the shadow of the great tower that Strange builds, where his eye will reach across the city, a hungry owl observing scared mice.  Helicopters patrol the sky, modern replacements of the old zeppelins that once watched the streets.  TYGER… soldiers of oppression, who pray to pounce on minorities, the unsuspecting, the undeserving.  There is a reason damn near every TYGER operative you’ve ever seen has been a white man.  It’s Strange’s own little experiment in racist cruelty.

                It is ramshackle, the garage eating it alive, and it is clear that whoever dwells here has given up on so much.  You knock on a door half-tattered.

                Raymond, skeletally thin, opens the door, and his visage is so changed- his demeanor so dark and shadowed- that it takes you a moment to recognize him.  His hay blonde hair is a long wisp that hasn’t been cut in months, his eyes bearing arctic blue pupils unnaturally small in the dimness of night, white schlera dominating and dissipating the thin pinpoints of his blue in their vastness.  It is clear he hasn’t been eating, and what he has eaten hasn’t sat well with him.

                “ Raymond Straw?” you ask, voice a dry creak in the night air.

                He looks at you, cautious, and you wonder how much _you_ have changed- thinner, more gaunt, body covered in bruised and scarred remnants of Arkham imprisonment and mistreatment, but more muscular, too, built up from months of practicing with Joker, practice extended to everyone now in these past few weeks.  Only Croc already knows how to fight, but he has never had a partner to train with; Croc is pure raw power, but he has no finesse, and with your aid he is developing it.  You never expected to be training a resistance group- especially one that has only briefly admitted, in secret, to even _being_ a resistance group, resisting Gotham itself- but you have always been a teacher, and you are grateful that they are attentive students.

                “ Dr. Crane?” he asks, and you nod.

                “ Yes,” you say, because though it is not _your_ name, it is still _a_ name, and one you answer to.  “ Though it has been some time since I had tenure.  May I enter?”

                He nods, slowly, stepping aside.  “ I see Arkham is as bad as they say,” he mutters, glancing you over.  “ Come inside.”

                Invited, you enter, and your guard stays outside, as is proper.  They were _not_ invited, after all.

                The home is spotless, the furious scrubbed clean of obsession.  Pictures of Otto line every available space, many obviously printed off of a cell phone.  There is an antiseptic smell of orange cleaner and bleach, mingling with grease and oil from the garage, like life intruding on death.  There are no lights but candlelight, though harsh glare from the crack of the garage door explains where Otto came from, why his eyes are mere thin needles of blue- light more fitting for an autopsy, body on the slab than a car garage.  This place is a tomb.

                ( Perhaps it’s not surprising, and perhaps this place is not so mighty as a tomb.  _Gotham_ is a tomb.  This is simply one of its caskets.)

                “ Why are you here?” Raymond asks, but gently.  “ Be careful, there are wanted posters everywhere for you.  They’re even putting it on social media.”

                “ To apologize,” you intone, and leave it at that.  He knows why and you’re not going to cheapen this with words, not when you are both more fond of silence (a fact learned from your first meeting with Raymond).  You are both silent for a long time, until he sighs.

                “ Otto loved you.” The words come out in a sigh.  “ He admired you- he never told you, but his father had kicked him out for being gay.  He’d done everything his parents asked, except that one last thing- but straight A’s football star and homecoming king don’t mean nothing compared to being a faggot.  You’re a lot like his father was, before he was kicked out; your approval meant the world to him.  We talked about it, the danger of supporting you, opposing Strange- but we agreed not to give up.”

                He closes his eyes, and in another sigh, says, “ I accept your apology.  It is your fault- but he wanted to, and I let him.  It was the right thing to do.”

                You feel little inside.  He has every right to be enraged at you, to blame you- because it _is_ your fault, if someone dies taking up your banner then it is on your head- but he is not angry at all.  You lower your head, eyes surprisingly wet.

                “ What will you do?” he asks as he opens his eyes again.  You compose yourself for a moment before answering.

                “ Kill Strange,” you say.  “ Fix this city- if I can.  I think Strange is only the symptom- there’s got to be a cause somewhere, some _reason_ for all this…”

                He nods.  “ Otto told me- he saw things.  He wasn’t ever sure about it but- there were things he’d seen.  He was never religious, but I’m superstitious, which is much the same thing, and the things he was saying he’d seen- visions out of the corner of his eye at rallies, people in the middle of his speeches who stood out from everyone around them, a man who never stopped smiling.  Nothing obvious but that’s what sets my hackles off.  He got creeped out too- had me bulletproof our car.  I don’t know what’s out there but it’s not normal.”

                You know a man who is not a man, a great crocodile beast with a noble heart, St. George _as_ the dragon instead of against it.  You do not doubt Raymond’s words.  “ I believe you.”

                He pauses, looks you in the eye, his own slowly widening to darkness, then says, “ Ok.  Otto thought he could talk it down but I was raised in the south- and I’ve never been able to hide being gay.  I know that fighting is the only way out, sometimes.  You need something to defend yourself with.”

                That’s true, and it’s not like you can buy a gun- strict gun laws in Gotham were created by Strange to “restrict criminal usage”.  Mostly to restrict the good people, since you know from Harley that it’s an open secret that he’s supplying the gangs.  Gun laws are a good thing, usually, but anything can be a doubled edge.  “ True.”

                “ Come back at midnight in thirteen days,” Raymond intones, and you nod your head.  You know why thirteen days, and you know why midnight.

                There is power in symbols.

                You nod and take your leave, and you and your companions head home to the sewers, where the appointed time comes to pass in relative peace, as you plan out what you will do next. 

-

                Your name is Raymond Straw.  Once, your name was _Raymond and Otto Straw_ , and it will never be that again.  You stand on the far side of life, after the peak, where the slide into oblivion begins.

                It will be a welcome release, but there are goals yet unmet- vengeance yet unsated- and thus you work during the slide.  There is a project to be done, in the ways it must be done.  There is something out there, which you have never named, because to name it would be to call it.  You know how this works.

                ( _Demon_ is as close as you will come, and it is too close- the abyss that does not stare back but eats you, that grabs you tight round the throat.  There is something rotten in the state of Gotham, owl silent and pig rot, big as the sky- red, red as hellfire, the breaking of bridges.  Something is here that has waited all eternity to begin.)

                You do not fear death, you embrace it, but Otto is dead and his goals are unmet.  Gotham is not free.  He would want you to save the only man who has ever been worthy of being called his father.  He would _not_ want you to avenge him, but you don’t do _all_ of it for Otto- some of it you do for yourself, because _you_ want _vengeance_.  And Dr. Crane, scarecrow-thin (why does your mind say Scarecrow-thin?) is your ticket to victory.  You may even start eating again- you want to see Strange’s head on a pike.  You want to see him fall.

                So you begin.  The first step is the right weapon.  What he will wield must not be a gun- he would never be able to hide it, and the brutality TYGER and the cops inflict on those found with zip guns is something to behold.  They’ve even restrained their own gun access, supposedly for fear of them getting in the wrong hands- but you suspect there’s something stranger at work here. 

                At any rate, at least giving him something besides a gun is not a death sentence.  The category that leaves open is enormous, but you know that there is only one thing you _can_ give him- something apropos, part and parcel of what he is.  That part of you which avoids breaking mirrors, it knows what to give him.  There is something to superstition, which in smarter times is called wisdom; everything is connected.

               The plans are drawn up, the material gathered.  Special materials, with their own histories, gathered at the right time and the right places.  And in the right way, too- the way of fear, stealth and shadows.  You are a thin man, and a silent one, and it makes you a passable thief.  From a cemetary, a tall straight piece of good stout oak.  From a makeshift gallows, wherein a man was hanged by his neighbors for his crimes, rope.  Steel from a mill where accidents were common, and where the good doctor’s friends had already been- when you went in, to steal the steel and get what was required, you found clown masks and balloons everywhere, white and purple, red and black.  One of the foremen of the steel mill, who had pushed a man in and gotten away with it because his father owned the place, had been hanged with brightly colored cloth, after being savagely beaten with hammers.  While everyone was standing around wondering what to do, you had slipped away with a block of steel ready to be shaped, and with another prize- some of the man’s blood, to go on the edge.  It’s something his friends did and that makes it something that might help him.

                You work on it only at night, with only candelight- a strain to the eyes, but there are things that must be done a certain way.  Darkness, and death, and the unknown- all things of fear.  Dr. Crane was a man obsessed with fear, and there is no better weapon you can give him than terror. You bleed over the weapon as well, and at the last- as it finally settles in your over-equipped garage, your makeshift blacksmithery- you take a heavy silver pendant Otto had given you, something fun and pagan at heart he had made for you, and you melt it down and add it to the edge, a thin shell on the edge of the steel.

               That part is _your_ contribution.

               In time, and with many sleepless nights, it is done, and the professor of fear comes to you for his weapon.

-

                 You are Scarecrow, and the time is nigh.  You approach your former student’s home with a feeling of hope, elation- wondering what you shall find.

                 Raymond lets you in without a word, and you enter a home with no illumination but a single dim, flickering candle, flame half-choked by melted wax.  In that guttering light, Raymond leans tiredly upon a wall, a skull grin on his face- not happy, nor sad.  Simply grim, and set.  You wonder if he is even aware he is doing it at all.

                 “ I have it for you,” he says, and holds it up.

                 It is a long sickle, long enough to be a comfortable cane or a quarterstaff, heavily lacquered with blue leaning on black- the exact color that would not show up at night, the way jet black would.  The blade, too, is lacquered, dark on dark, sucking up light.  There is no gleam in it, between it and its shadow there is no difference, and it is _perfect_.

                Raymond offers it to you, this great blade, his thin-sharp body dark against the wall, hooded in its own shadow- the grim reaper.

                Of course.  You are Scarecrow, fear itself.  Who else could give you a weapon but the personification of the fear of death?  There are no accidents.  Responsibility must be taken.

                So with grave and gentle hands, you take up the scythe.  Finally, you are ready to begin.

                “ Does it have a name?” you ask, because you must ask, and you have no right to name it.  You will bear it- but you did not create it.  Only the creator has a right to name, unless they give it to another.

                Raymond smirks.

                “ None.  I refuse it any name.  After all…”

                And he says something that makes you realize he knows _exactly_ what your name is.

                “ What’s scarier than the unknown?”

                You take your leave, bowing, and return home with your nameless blade.  Your guard returns as well, and Harley’s got a poster in one of her jester-clothed hands- slight flecks of blood on one edge where her and Joker interrupted a mugging.

                (Not dead man’s blood- just a punk kid with no better idea of what to do.  A broken nose sent him home.)

                “ Look at this!” she says, flicking it open.  “ Seems like a party that Strange will be at.  Ooh, ooh, and all of his second in commands!  Here’s a lieutenant of TYGER, and a colonel, and one of the mayor’s main cronies… even the warden of Arkham Asylum!  A big party!”

                Joker laughs.  “ Hey, the more the merrier!  Makes it easy, we can decapitate the lot of them at once.  Where’s it at?”

                “ Some grand opening!” she said, turning the paper around.  “ Look at this!”

                The picture is for something called the _Iceberg Lounge_ , as declared in italics on the paper.  In addition to the penguins and ice on the cover, you see a man with a suit and tie- a remarkably odd looking man.  The man you see is... well, he's a penguin. He looks like one and dresses like one, and there are no accidents- here is a man who has embraced his looks, given the penguin theme, the nature of his club as an iceberg.  He’s deformed, but money is a superpower all by itself, greater even than Croc’s muscles, and he’s used it not to cover up his peculiar looks but to embrace them.  He looks rather regal, if in that comical, absurd way penguins do.

                “ Well, well, well,” you say, and pull your sickle from its hiding place.  A clever contraption lets the blade rest against the haft- a way to keep your new toy concealed.  You flick the switch that whirs it up.

                “ Fascinating.”

                Joker claps and laughs.  “ That’s the spirit!  Any idea how we’ll get in?”

                You do.  “ There’s a chemical I was working on before I was imprisoned…”

**Author's Note:**

> We return, children! The Straw family was based on two thugs Scarecrow once had working for him in the comics, though it was VERY early on, and the Straw boys (or possibly Strawboys) are very, very obscure.


End file.
